Shortsightedness
This was an interesting title, given that isolating, not going out, is a strange thing to do unless you’re a monk. Actually, the article is even more bold, it should really be titled “Why do you spend time with other people?” which is a question the author posits in the first paragraph.
The author has a semi-cynical tone, which manifests in such sentences like “And truly, who has ever been satisfied by people?” as she compares socializing with addiction to smoking, making a shaky and offensive idea, which may be the purpose of the whole essay. In trying to demonstrate the bad side of socialization, she uses an interesting simile “telling someone about an insult is like telling them about a dream.” She ends it with the take-away that maybe people socialize “in order to fall short”, and that, in the end, one must go about being addicted to people. It seems short-sighted to me, like she’s looking down a cigarette and seeing the smoke but not seeing the bags of cocaine stacked in front of her. What I mean is, it doesn’t address her evident neuroticism, evident in the second paragraph, where she says if she figured out why she was going out, then she might be less critical and suspicious of herself, not realizing that it’s precisely that which is the problem, not the going out part.